Diane Duane - A Wizard Alone

Nita nodded, put the deck down on the desk, and cut it twice, to the right, to make three piles.

“Turn one card over,” she said.

Millman reached out and turned over the top card of the leftmost deck. The top card was the five of diamonds.

“Not bad at all,” Millman said. “Do I get to pick another one?”

Nita gave him a look. “I wouldn’t push your luck if I were you,” she said.

He grinned a little and sat back.

“You look a whole lot better,” he said.

“I feel a whole lot better,” Nita said. “And I think I don’t need to be here anymore.”

“What, school?” Millman said, raising his eyebrows.

“Not school here. Here here,” Nita said.

“Oh, you’re cured then?” he said.

Nita cracked up. “Why not?” she said. And then said, “Cured of what?”

“You would be the one to tell me that,” Millman said.

Nita was quiet for a moment. “If you mean, am I over my mom dying? Don’t be silly,” she finally said. “She’ll always be part of me. It’s going to hurt for a long time that she’s not still in my house. But nothing can take her out of my life. Am I over wanting to just sit and suffer and let life go by? I think so.”

“Then I would say,” Mr. Millman said, “that my work here is done. Insofar as any of it was my work.”

He reached out and turned over the top card on the middle pack. It was the ace of spades. “Aha,” he said.

“What?”

“Highly symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“Well, that would be a long story. That little leaf-shaped thing, the ‘spade’…” Mr. Millman picked up the card, looked closely at it. “The history of the word is tangled. But it goes back at least as far as the Greek spatha . That was a sword, once upon a time. Of the four suits, that’s the one that has most to do with power: air, the sound the sword makes in the air, the spoken word; the weapons held by the Power that faces down the Power That Fell…”

He picked up the ace and the three cut packs, shuffling them together again.

Nita looked at him.

“So,” Mr. Millman said, putting the deck down on the desk and doing a credible riffle… much too credible, now that Nita thought of it, for a man who claimed that he couldn’t get the cards to stay up his sleeve. “Any last questions before we finish up here?”

She looked at him, thought for a moment, and found a question it would never before have occurred to her to ask him. The answer would have been in her manual, but she wasn’t going to consult that right now. Considering the question, Nita first made sure that she had the wizardry she wanted ready in the back of her head. If you were going to remove someone’s memory, the less time you spent dithering over it, the better.

“Are you on errantry?” Nita said.

He raised his eyebrows again in that expression she’d learned could mean almost anything but surprise.

“No,” Mr. Millman said. “But I know some people who are.”

Nita sat there, astonished, trying not to exhibit it. Millman sat there and kept shuffling.

“You don’t have to be a wizard to know one,” Millman said, “once you know what you’re looking for. And when you’re willing to see what you’re looking at. Not many people are, but that’s humans for you.” He fanned out the cards for her. “Pick a card, any card.”

Nita picked one, turned it over. It was the joker.

Mr. Millman grinned, folded the hand up, tapped the cards back into order, and pushed the deck back toward Nita, meanwhile glancing at the door. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said. “And I’ve had a word with your sister’s counselor: She’ll be introducing me to Dairine later in the week. Meanwhile, go well.“

Nita got up and took back her pack of cards, grinning, too. She headed for the door.

There she paused as something occurred to her. “‘Supposed to have been counseling’?” she said.

Mr. Millman shrugged.

Nita shook her head again. “ Dai stibo ,” she said, and left.

That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight, wobbling around and around, shining on something, while somewhere off in the near distance, a single drum held a drumroll.

What the spotlight was following was a clown act. The clown had purple hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, the circles ever decreasing. Around and around and around went the clown, in jerky, wobbling movements. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t get off! I can’t get off !

The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. It had already pounced. Now the tiger had become part of the clown…and the clown was its cage.

Nita woke up to the bright daylight, reflected from snow onto the ceiling of her bedroom… and she grinned.

The doorbell rang. Kit glanced up as he was throwing books into his book bag. He would have gone to the door himself, but his sister plunged past him. “What?” Kit said, looking all around to try to understand why Carmela was suddenly so hot to answer the door.

No answer came back. Kit could do little but shrug and finish packing his book bag. He stood up from the sofa just in time to look out the window and see the UPS truck pull away.

His sister closed the front door and nearly danced past him into the kitchen. “ What ?” Kit said.

Carmela got a particularly large knife out of the knife rack and began slitting the packing tape on the large box she’d been carrying. Kit fastened his bag and wandered over.

“It has to be clothes,” he said. After a childhood during which Carmela’s major occupation had been ruining the OshKosh overalls that were all their parents dared buy her, Carmela had suddenly discovered clothing as something besides protection from the elements. Now all her pocket money went in this direction, either down at the mall or via various strange mail-order firms. “Nothing but clothes gets you this excited anymore,” Kit said. “Except maybe Miguel.”

And having said that, Kit prepared to protect himself from the explosion that was sure to follow.

I can’t believe I said that to her while she was holding a knife !

But the explosion didn’t follow. Carmela, grinning all over her face and singing a little la-la song, put the knife aside, opened the top of the box, and started removing the contents. These seemed to be only Styrofoam peanuts for the first thirty seconds or so. But then Carmela reached in and lifted out something wrapped in foam.

“It’s not clothes,” Kit said, astonished.

“Nope,” Carmela said. “Much better.”

This statement left Kit completely confused. Carmela carefully started unwrapping the foam from around the object.

“It’s some hair thing,” Kit said. “One of those hot curlers.”

Carmela just smiled and kept on unwrapping.

The last bit of wrapping fell away. Carmela held the object up delightedly, admiring it in the morning light, and then thrust it into Kit’s hands.

“Let’s see what the directions say,” she said. She turned back to the box and started digging through the Styrofoam peanuts again.

Kit looked at what he was holding. It looked very much like an eggbeater, except that eggbeaters don’t usually have pulse lasers built into them.